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Intentions Re-Figured—The Consumption and Production of Hollywood Cinema:
Intersections in Nationality, Race, Gender, and Sexuality, A Proposal for an Anthology, edited by David Gerstner and Janet Staiger

Call for Papers Date:

2000-12-01 (Archive)

Date Submitted:

2000-11-05

Announcement ID:

126697

Intentions Re-Figured—The Consumption and Production of Hollywood Cinema:
Intersections in Nationality, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

A Proposal for an Anthology

edited by David Gerstner and Janet Staiger

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave
it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in
order. At least spare us their morality when we write."

Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

This edited anthology will include essays that consider how directors, producers, scriptwriters, and other Hollywood and American artists have
consumed Hollywood cinema in relationship to cinema and the other arts and how this cultural consumption enabled their creative practices in producing new American films. We are particularly concerned to think through how nationalities, race, gender, and sexuality are factors within these
practices of consumption and production. Thus, the implications of the intersections of these individuals’ identities in the act of creative production require an extensive historical and textual analysis of their particular contexts.

Theoretical and Historiographical Objectives

This collection has several historiographical objectives. First, it attempts to return to the problem of biographism, authorship, and intentionality in
media, concerns problematized by such writers as Michael Baxandall, Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. While we acknowledge the
difficulties associated with asserting agency in the act of production, we believe that recent work in cultural studies on consumers of media texts
reopens the door to a complexly theorized discussion of creative agency. If fans and groups of viewers can be said to produce texts that are
circulated—from simply interesting interpretations to entirely new fan narratives—then theorizing, in similar ways, the texts that Hollywood
workers produced seems justified. To be clear, we are interested in a ‘biographism’ of cultural consumption and production that draws upon its
complex historical relationship to nation, race, gender, and sexuality.

Second, we wish to emphasize that the work involved in writing the history of these creative acts of consumption and production is itself an on-going
process which resists a finalized or totalized account of "facts." We are interested, then, in the transformative possibilities of writing history, or
what Michel de Certeau suggests is the practice of "making history." In this formulation, history is not History as such. In this historiographical
model, the writing of history is the ongoing re-writing of histories.

Third, we wish to draw upon recent theoretical work that re-conceptualizes individual identity as constituted via the intersections of material
discourses. Identities bump up against the realities of the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic circumstances of historical moments. This is all well
and good, but such an image of the subject does not deal with the concept of agency as a complex circumstance of position-taking. As the work of
several key post-structuralists stress, the question is not simply an issue of the "death of the author." Rather, the question more fruitfully posed is
"what is an author?" Seen in this light, the consideration of agency is a way to revisit the cultural producer not as a privileged character of cultural
ideology, but as a cultural body restrained by that ideology yet enabled with performative and illocutionary possibilities. Agency is certainly an act of
consumption and production where creative practice intersects with the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, and class that ultimately affect agency and experience. Theorizing this (contradictory) self has recently been aided by the concept of "intersectionality." Indeed, we use the term
"intersectionality" as it is currently theorized in third-wave feminist scholarship and critical race theory so as to underscore the critical approach
we take in this collection to the human subject. Intersectionality recognizes the interlocking and relational feature of identities.

Questions for the authors (and readers):

1) What is at stake for the body in the writing of history through a theoretical model that queries historical subjectivity and positionality?

2) In what ways might a radical version of history be written? How can one engage in a project that not only explores and complicates acts of
consumption and production in particular contexts, but one that is theoretically aware of its own gesture as work of writing (in Derrida’s sense), a work of intervention, in its own contemporary context?

3) How can the writings of histories serve as an intervention both at the level of subject-positionality but also in the areas of interdisciplinary
concerns? This project seeks to open fields of study through an interdisciplinary model that weaves larger cultural and historical concerns within a particular field (i.e., film studies). Can we any longer simply speak of simply film studies as film studies? How has cultural studies, deconstruction, poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, and so forth damaged the "disciplines" as disciplines?

Practical Matters

We are calling for essays that consider these issues in relation to specific individuals or groups of individuals. Because of our concerns, we would
prefer all cases to involve someone (or group) with at least one non-hegemonic identity or identification. We would like the theoretical issues to be a
significant portion of the essay but not to overwhelm an actual discussion of historical and creative matters.

Ideas, abstracts, partial or full papers should be sent by December 1, 2000, to David Gerstner . A tentative deadline for final papers of approximately 8,000 to 9,000 words would be December 1, 2001. New York
University Press is considering this anthology.

David Gerstner is Lecturer at the University of Otago (New Zealand) until December 6, 2000, and Assistant Professor at the City University of New
York—Staten Island after 1 February 2000. He is author of "Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetic of Vincente Minnelli" in Modernity and
"Queer Angels of History Take it and Leave it From Behind" in The Stanford Humanities Review.

Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of several books including most recently Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception and Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era.

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